The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.16 standard is a wireless communication system that uses a signal transmission scheme called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) in order to provide a high speed data service even when a user is on the move, and employs an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based on the OFDM in order to raise spectrum use efficiency even more.
Generally, data is mapped to a radio resource and transmitted in a wireless communication system. Transmission data goes through a channel encoding (Forward Error Correction (FEC)) process, as a technique that may compensate for an error occurring during data transmission, and a modulation process. When data size is large, the data cannot be processed using a single FEC block, so channel encoding is performed through a plurality of FEC blocks. In this situation, an output of each FEC block is modulated by a modulation process and then mapped to an allocated resource and transmitted. For this purpose, an entire allocated resource needs to be divided depending on the number of FEC blocks. Generally, an entire allocated resource includes a set of a plurality of resource units with a predetermined size (for example, a Logical Resource Unit (LRU)). In addition, the allocated resource includes not only a resource (data tone) for data transmission but also a resource (pilot tone) for channel estimation. The number of the resources may change depending on requirements thereof. Generally, the number of pilot tones in a resource unit with a predetermined size has a different value depending on the number of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) streams.
Therefore, for mapping data encoded and modulated using a plurality of FEC blocks to a resource allocated into each FEC block of an entire resource, a resource for data transmission among the entire resource needs to consider the number of MIMO streams as well as the number of FEC blocks to perform effective resource segmentation.
Therefore, there is a need for an apparatus and a method for resource segmentation that are effective when a plurality of FEC blocks is used in a wireless communication system.